Spotlight on Nick Kaldas - BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival

okay good morning uh and welcome everybody to the bad sydney crime writers festival i'm jana vent and i'm delighted to welcome you to the dixon room today uh i want to start by acknowledging the gadigal people of the eora nation as the traditional owners of this land and pay respect to elders past and present i have to go through the usual run of housekeeping so bear with me as you will have already seen we are following covert protocols i'm sure you've seen that with the distancing in this room it means that there are very much limited numbers in this room hand sanitizer is available at the door uh we ask that you please try to respect uh these protocols and uh the standing one and a half meters away from anyone in your in your orbit we're all used to these conventions now so we'd ask that you please follow them um please would you mute your mobile phones um don't record the session if you're taking photos please turn off your flash also feel free to share on social media bad crime sydney bad crime sydney we will have i should tell you we will have about 10 to 15 minutes of question time questions from you so i don't uh i don't hog the floor here uh with our guests so on to the on to the business of the day um it is my great pleasure to be here today particularly as it gives me the opportunity to mine the formidably extensive experience of our guest many of you would know nick caldis as a former new south wales deputy police commissioner nick served in that position for nearly a decade until 2016. that role and other executive positions he held were preceded by many years in the hard grind of day-to-day police work nick's overall experience spans community policing major crime investigations and operations including counterterrorism protection operations armed robbery and major drug investigations covert operations emergency management and over a decade significantly over a decade in homicide all that and more adds up to nearly 35 years in the force i think you could safely say that nick had well and truly done the business by the time he got to taking up police executive roles but beyond that nick also has substantial experience in a range of investigations outside of australia to mention just a few in 2016 he was chief of investigations in the un-sponsored effort looking into the use of chemical weapons in the syrian conflict he was also chief of investigations at the un special tribunal for lebanon which examined the assassinations of former lebanese pm rafi khariri and 21 others he is currently a member of a committee overseeing a scotland yard investigation of crimes alleged to have been committed during the so-called troubles in northern ireland it's been commissioned this investigation by the government of northern ireland now i am going to stop there because if i ran through next complete cv we'd have no time left to ask him any questions and that is the object of the exercise today so before we move on to that can i please ask you to join me in welcoming nick helders [Applause] nick we're lucky to have you um because of the range of experience that i've just described and i'm i'm going to take you through a number of um fields of your expertise but here's a very basic thing they do say that you haven't been a cop until you faced an angry man do you remember your first experience of an angry man or woman should i say um and how you dealt with that thanks jana um i i just wanted to thank the organisers and you for having me and for all of you coming out in cove at times um taking the risk and coming out today that i was just going to say about that introduction now i can't wait to hear myself after that but um um i i think thankfully i haven't seen too many angry women i've seen unfortunately too many angry men i had a few years in the arm hold up squad and i think nearly all the people were arrested in that space were angry some of them had to be wrestled more or less to get them to where we wanted to get them i do recall one in uniform i started about maine that's 40 years next year and there was a fellow who had gone to a dinner party and uh with friends at a friend's place and six or eight people at this dinner party and it was pre uh ice and all these really dangerous drugs so i don't know what happened to him but he had a brain snap and he literally just lost it and became incredibly violent he actually smashed the apartment up before we were called televisions couches he smashed everything up and that's when they called the police because he'd had some sort of episode um eventually there's quite a number of police turned up but my workmate and i were the first ones to come through the door and we couldn't wait for anybody else to turn up obviously we had to act so we launched and it was a wrestling match incredibly physical and violent it felt like it was half an hour but i'm told it was more like five minutes um i ended up spaining my ankle very badly which still gives me a bit of grief i end up in raw prince alfred hospital after we finished my friend had had a few bits of bark off him um face wise and otherwise but we managed to subdue this fellow eventually and handcuffing and then other police turned up and getting him out of the apartment was another battle with his feet going everywhere we don't have handcuffs for a feed unfortunately um but it was it's just one of those things i mean these poor people who hadn't done anything wrong they were just sitting there um they count on the police obviously to come through and sort of save them from something so you know just really violent so so what's that experience like at that stage of your career is that i mean it is literally a blooding i suppose but does it change your thinking about the work that you're there no no i don't think so i think it's what you're trained for it's what you prepare for um it's what all uniformed police do in the beginning of each shift they get dirt themselves and get ready basically for that could happen any time in a shift uh could happen many times in one shift i've been to plenty of pub rules and and that sort of thing domestic situations where someone's gone off their head um you're there you're the sort of the barrier of the filter between these violent people and innocent people who may get hurt and that's what keeps you going on on the subject of uh wrongdoing violence i mean is there such a thing do you think as as pure evil um i'm not a psychologist but i'd say yes and i think there's plenty of people i've arrested or been a part of operations on who would probably fall in that category people who genuinely did not care about anyone except themselves and had no conscience no sense of what's right or wrong no moral compass and they had their insatiable desire for whatever it was whether it's you know rapists or or money motivation or whatever they prepared to do whatever it was to satiate their desires i think that's what makes them evil is because they don't actually care about what their actions are doing to innocent people so you think with a with a person like that that rehabilitation is simply out of the question i think probably that's right um i think of some of the people who've arrested over the years murderers particularly they're unrepentant uh no apology they don't they will never admit to themselves or anybody else that what they did was wrong uh and if they had their time over again i suspect they do it all again so if that's the case i don't know whether you can ever really reform them and certainly some of the religiously or politically motivated people who commit violence in that space and the jihadists i think a lot of them are unfixable i mean it doesn't mean you stop trying we must all try to get them back to normal but i'm i look at some of the people we arrested in counter-terrorism here who convinced authorities that they had been gotten better and were released from jail ultimately ending up fighting with isis in syria they did a snow job on authorities they convinced them that they were okay but that that they were reformed but they hadn't not at all well that is an area that i that i want to return uh through with you a little later on um i mentioned uh your decade or so in homicide obviously you've just referenced that and your experience investigating criminal gangs it makes you the perfect person to ask about the building blocks of an investigation you know if we take perhaps a couple of examples to get a concrete idea of how the process works if we just let's say imagine a criminal gang a member of a criminal gang is is shot dead outside his house let's say two men are seen taking off by by some witnesses by some neighbors police arrive at a scene like that can you give us a clue of how an investigation like that would proceed sure it's probably important to just delineate there are two types of investigations major crime investigations there's reactive investigations where something has happened a fraud a murder a rape something terrible and then you come in and investigate that and then there's re proactive investigations where you haven't had a call there isn't necessarily a crime scene you haven't been told that something bad has happened but you've got intelligence that gets you to a point where you need to investigate organized crime groups as you said yana middle east organized crime groups outlaw motorcycle gangs ethnic you know russian organized crime groups groups or asian triads or whatever it might be the the investigative process is is similar in some ways but is also quite different for the reactive ones where you've had a call as they say the calls come in and then you go out there are building blocks absolutely and they are obviously the physical evidence the crime scene the forensic evidence whether it's a post-mortem or some other medical examination of someone who may not have passed away there might be ballistic evidence explosives evidence the witnesses statements the canvassing of the surrounding areas and then probably one of the most important things is victimology that's everything to do with your victim particularly with the murder you need to find out as much as you can about who hated your victim who loved your victim what has he been doing recently all of these things the victimology if you put all these building blocks together you'll hopefully get a picture of of where you need to go with the investigation and then what happens then is you have quite a number of lines of the murder of john newman that i'm not sure if you mentioned it he's a member of parliament he had 97 lines of inquiry when we started out and over a period of six seven years we actually dwindled that down to one and then we convicted someone in the end but there were a lot of people who had clashed with john newman he was i'm sure he was a good man i didn't meet him but he was controversial and he advocated things that caused people to threaten him with death and all of that everyone who had ever threatened him had to be investigated and eliminated as a suspect obviously so that's the i'm sorry to have gone on a bit but that's the reactive type of investigation proactive investigations are very different and you know a lot of people have argued over the years that you're either good at one or the other i hope i've done both and i think a good detective should be able to do both the the proactive ones is where you haven't had the call hasn't come in you haven't had a crime scene you haven't had a an incident you can pin your finger on for a date or a time or a place it might be an organized crime group that you think are up to no good and therefore you investigate them and that's where it becomes quite you have to be imaginative uh you have to be able to use your your initiative basically um you work out who the main bad guys are you work out what it is they're doing and then you work out what you need to do whether you need to tap phones tap houses uh seek informants from disgruntled former members seek enemies you may want to say something about what they're doing seek victims out most importantly to see if they're prepared to tell you whatever it is they've suffered at this group's hands and you put all that together and these days obviously there's one other vital aspect which is assets and it has become and has been for probably two decades now a very important part of any investigator's armory which is to look at people's assets unexplained wealth work out and they do have to answer for that at some stage the onus has shifted legally unless it's shifted back in the last couple of years while i wasn't watching the onus is on someone who's been arrested and charged with criminal matters it's up to them to prove where all their money came from otherwise there's a good chance it will be confiscated and i think that asset confiscation stuff and there's been a swag of legislation come through and i think a lot of support for it from the public um if you're a criminal particularly if you've been convicted and it's known that you're a leader of a mount or motorcycle gang i don't think anyone should say yeah they should keep all the money they don't have jobs they don't work at it for a living this is their living it's crime um and if we take their assets away then it really does have an impact on the organization on the individual on the individual and perhaps also a little bit of a you know dissuades others from doing what these people have done in some small way let me tackle it from another direction in some quarters there is some uh sensitivity to identifying a criminal gang uh by the ethnic origin of the criminal gang where do you stand on that issue i look up i have some sympathy for those who say you shouldn't have an asian crime area or a middle east organized crime area but that is what they are that's the work they do i don't if somebody can think of another way to call them or you can scrub it all together um sure but i've probably in my old age i've probably reverted a bit and i'm thinking i don't think those crime squads exist anymore i think they have changed their names uh to a more general organized crime uh name but i don't i didn't i never thought it was actually that big a deal but some people obviously felt they were they were being singled out but the reality was and this is for me is what should decide what we call it what is the actual work they're doing um and if it is an ancient crime syndicates that they're investigating then i don't know why you can't call it the asian crime squad because that's what it is it is yeah yeah um you mentioned um before jihadist crimes uh what what kind of criminality do you think we're talking about in in in those cases is it is it simply uh i mean in some cases let's take australian uh issues and australian cases i mean are we talking about criminality that's mixed up in the search for money or what what is it is there a blurring of the lines or what yeah it's definitely both in australia and overseas i would argue that that line between pure profit driven criminality and religiously or politically motivated violence is actually blurring what we have seen in australia for some time now is a cooperation if you like between criminal groups and those who are jihadists or that way inclined and perhaps one example is so just to answer the question specifically i think they'll be in anything that helps them achieve their goals so if it's about credit card fraud motor vehicle rebirthing whatever it might be and it helps them catch up so they can do the other stuff they're happy to do it and they will find willing uh partners to do that stuff and one example is the you might recall the case of the missing rocket launchers um that was a classic example of those who were criminally oriented and those who were jihadists um the rocket launchers were stolen from the australian military by a crooked major who has been charged and convicted and jailed he had sold him to an organised crime group who sold them to a lebanese organized crime group who then sold it onto the jihadists and we had this funny incident where a particular criminal who is not really a jihadist he's a pure criminal and took some some pride in that um had a we had a conflict between two notable crime groups in in the arabic community and uh he got his hands on one of the rocket launchers went to this fellow's house in southwest sydney and had it aimed at his at his house his enemy that he wanted to take out it would have done a lot of damage and killed a lot of people and eventually one of the people who was in the car was enrolled and became an informant and told us and made statements and that's how we know exactly what happened but he looked at these enemies house which was a fibro house and he realized there's a possibility the rocket may actually go through the house and come out the other side where his cousin lived so he didn't do it simply because he thought it might hurt his cousin and we're thankful for that yeah i'm sure you were do you think we know enough about the the psychology of an attacker motivated by extreme religious beliefs i think australians generally struggle to understand we're not apathetic but we don't care as much about politics as they do in other places in the world i mean in the middle east i'm egyptian born born and brought up and migrated here as a teenager i grew up from a very early age that's all we talked about in the house it was politics it was about uh not just politics in your own country but politics you know our relationship with america what america was doing in the middle east you know everybody had a view and everybody everyone felt really passionate excuse me i'm just gonna have a very quick drink of water talk amongst yourselves we will let nick have a drink of water but um obviously nick's vast experience means we can range not only through the australian experience but lots and lots of insights into his work overseas and having lived overseas for a period of time i've padded long enough now nick so you were about to say yes sorry thank you thanks for that forget phillip um the the thing is i i think most australians don't really understand how anyone can feel so angry that they want about politics that they want to go out and kill as many people as they can which we are sadly seeing all over the world at the moment in paris i think in france or some attacks recently has been attacks in austria again recently it's it's almost a weekly for monthly event where something bad's happening because somebody felt so strongly um that they got up off the couch and went and sort of got knives or explosives or whatever i don't know what we i we've all struggled with an answer to that and how we cut how we cope with it how we fix it how we get these people back on track i don't think there's any easy answer but one thing's for sure government police in particular and other government departments have an almost sacred duty to continue to engage with these communities to continue to try and empathize and understand their aspirations and thinking to try and deal with this issue ultimately i don't think government can fix this problem the communities themselves are capable of doing and are doing a great deal in terms of identifying the people who are troubled and then trying to deal with them trying to fix them from within families and communities someone might say it is within those communities that these people are born and where they thrive so where is the line for police who who do you cultivate if you like who who do you cultivate a friendship with to assist you and who is simply never going i think you've got to talk to everyone i mean one of them for about the last 15 years or so that i was in the police i led the effort in community engagement multicultural issues and so on and um you've got to talk to everyone even if you don't agree with them even if you think they may be you know up to no good you you must engage and you must continue there was relentless engagement but just a very very quick side story so i went to lebanon to investigate the assassination of the prime minister and other 21 murders that had occurred over four years and i got to know the national chief of police um quite well and in one of the many discussions we had he said to me we didn't have a really bad radicalization problem here you exported it to us from sydney he feels he felt that a lot of the problems they have now tripoli is a sort of sunni stronghold in lebanon where people who had grown up in southwest sydney and then had gone back to lebanon and took that radicalized um you know strain with them and and spread it he didn't he feels we've got a real problem here and i don't i've really struggled to understand that and to work out why i mean we live in a very lucky country um we're blessed and and i look at how we've dealt with covet compared to other places i look at how we deal with the last global financial crisis we're a stable democracy where people can live freely i mean we have issues of course we'll have issues but we deal with them and we can get on with life i don't know why anyone would be so disgruntled that they feel they have to sort of kill the world or anyone who disagrees with them i'm not sure i'll ever get my head around that but it's um it's what we're up against well indeed because that is a reality that thing you can't you of all people can't get your head around how how are police to to deal with that um if i had the answer i'd probably make a million bucks but um it relentless engagement is definitely one coupled with um enforcement and that must be fearless and and and unbiased so if you do get information regardless of what attacks you may get from community or from media or whatever you need to do what's right if you have information even if it singles out a particular group you've got to act and you have that sacred duty to protect the public obviously from what the bad guys want to do but it needs to be the two things enforcement definitely must happen arrests operations investigations um you know deterring things and and preventing obviously prevention is much better than having to do it after it's occurred um coupled with um the velvet glove of saying we want to engage we want to hear from you and i i do want to need to make this point jana most of the significant operations that have been run in australia that led to arrests in counter-terrorism real serious you know people who had become quite radicalized and were ready to do bad things or had done bad things most of the information that led to those arrests often comes from the community themselves and i don't think that's sort of publicly acknowledged not enough anyway because it is people within the communities who feel this isn't right i'm going to do something and the british had a series of posters and a program over there called if you see something say something and i really like that it's about saying to the people if you know something you've got an obligation to put your hand up and say um you'll be protected your identity won't be revealed all that stuff but all that's in place there's a national security hotline all of those things are in place let me just ask you on a personal level uh you've mentioned your egyptian background arabic speaking obviously that was of assistance in some ways doing the work that you were doing liaising with these communities that may have been troubled did it also mean that certain pressures were applied to you by those communities a little bit there was an expectation that you'd go soft because you are an arab there's certainly that and the other side of that coin is there's a certain amount of racism in government circles yeah i'd have to say um but i didn't feel ever the sort of pressure that would say look you're not going to run this operation or you're not going to investigate this group or you're not going to arrest so and so just because you're a fellow arab um the egyptian community by and large i'm sorry to say this don't get involved in criminal activity thankfully i don't have any you know relatives or anything that have been involved in anything so it'd probably be harder for someone from some of the other groups who whose community have real issues all right well let me let me move to a different part of the world altogether um namely i mentioned the fact that you were on this advisory board in relation to a scotland yard investigation of murders and other crimes alleged to have been committed during the troubles in northern ireland now we're talking decades and decades ago what are you looking for to satisfy yourself that an investigation like that conducted by the english by the british is is sound um that's a good question so operation canova it's ken ova if anyone wants to google it it all comes up um essentially what happened is there was a quite a large number of murders that occurred in in ireland in northern ireland ireland mainly but some in the south um allegedly committed by the ira on ira people because they suspected them of being informants for the british and you're right jana it spans probably the last 40 years maybe a little bit longer what's happened is the victims families have got together they got lawyers and they said that these cases were never investigated properly uh no one's ever been arrested none of them have been solved they're angry and gary dublin before me talked about the victims and trying to get them closure none of these people have closure some bodies were never found that people's bodies were never found um it's quite it's quite bad they began to win the court cases that they launched against the government and they forced the government of northern ireland to reinvestigate all of the murders everyone in ireland has a conflict everyone's had a history of being involved in this or that so they brought in a team from scotland yard they're not actually physically in ireland in london but they're back and forth as you do um and because it was so political they felt they needed an independent steering committee to oversight that investigation and that's what i'm on there's five or six of us um i've got no history of involvement with ireland i'm a sort of middle east guy um i haven't had anything to do with ireland so i'm completely independent i don't have i don't have any allegiances or or anything else um so we're simply oversighting the investigation we're ticking off on everything they're doing and hopefully giving the public in northern ireland a reassurance that these murders will once and for all be uh investigated properly and those who have committed them held to account very very short snapshot about what we're trying to achieve they want obviously they want closure they want to find the bodies that haven't been located even if they don't result in convictions they want to know who did it and they want they want their names cleared you might find this strange but a lot of the families and we did meet with quite a few of them in belfast earlier this year our steering committee they want those who have been accused of being informants and their loved ones were killed they're very very anxious about having their name clear that they were not informants that's what they want out of the investigation that whoever was killed was not and it's actually most of them were not informants so the ira had this thing called the nutting committee and that's the group of guys get together there's no women and they'd say um so and so he's i think he's a spy yeah yeah i think he's a spy they'd have a few more drinks and then they'd go and get him and kill him torture him and kill him that's basically what they were doing turns out the head of the nutting committee whose code name was steak knife s-t-a-k-e was actually the british informant he was the one he was feeding and then it appears that there were cases where certain authorities in the uk said doing um you know someone says looking at you they're getting a bit suspicious you better do something about them so he'd go and nominate so and so and they'd get him killed now you asked me about pure evil i think that fellow his name's fritz capiche um it's been in the media it's not a secret code name steak knife is probably one of those people i put in the pure evil category well again let me bring you back to what your role is this oversight role you've just described what sounds like a you know a cesspool of of criminality how do you actually make sure that this investigation is is headed in the direction that you would want it to head so there are obviously lines of inquiry which they report on regularly they discuss with us um there are some budget issues that we're happy to assist with we actually wrote at one stage as a group the steering committee to the prime minister of england because she had made comments in parliament attacking the investigation based on very bad advice it was theresa may some of it is about providing the investigators with top cover to make sure they can get on with the job they need to do rather than having to worry about the politics and all of that ultimately what we hope to gain what what the operation is aimed at is giving some semblance of justice to the victims considerable number of victims in ireland for all of these murders i didn't realize but the peace agreement in ireland which they call the easter agreement because it was worked out over easter i might stand corrected it's either the maximum you can do in jail no matter what you've done is two or three years so this fellow i think there'll be quite a number of charges hopefully coming his way um the maximum he can do out of those is about two or three years but they it did bring peace to the to ireland okay once again let's do a big backflip and come back to australia um i want to talk to you about an issue that's um throwing police ethics here in into question and that is the lawyer x case that's um that's playing out in melbourne um this is the case where a barrister representing very high uh profile criminals drug barons like tony mukbal and the like was at the same time used by victoria police as an informant um just out of interest had you ever heard rumors that any such thing was going on no no i don't think anyone had i think it was kept very tight obviously so if you're looking for positives at least they kept it a secret they can they kept their informant register a secret um i just don't know i i don't know a great deal about it i've only i only know what i've read in the media but on the face of it there's been probably failures of judgment on a number of levels certainly at the operational level people should have known this isn't going to fly and then at the management level someone should have been in place to say hang on a minute and then at the executive level if they had oversight and looks like they have it came out in the um in some of the um again someone should have just said hang on a minute it was sort of seemed to be a little bit of a herd mentality where they were getting valuable information and they just became addicted to it and perhaps it was very difficult to stop and not by way of an excuse at all but they were in the middle of a gang for a gang war which they were they were finding they were finding it very difficult to tackle to stop it from continuing to happen we've had issues here with groups sort of declaring war on each other maybe we took a different approach brothers for life is one that comes to mind i led that charge and within a month we pretty much had it mopped up but it was sort of it wasn't using their solicitor as an informant or their baxter as an informant there's a lot of dogged work um went into it i really it's just difficult for me to know exactly what they were thinking because no one's ever got in the witness box and said look we did it because but i guess you said no one said hang on a minute but but that's a very small way to put something um of this gravity this went on for years and years from what we know there was a top-down awareness of this well let me put it to you this way is this really off the charts impropriety or is it something that would be a temptation for any police anywhere who are in a struggle against crime i don't think it'd be the sort of temptation that would lure around cops who was you know thinking about things rationally and sensibly um i haven't heard of it happening anywhere else so that tells me something i think it was probably a combination of things and it's very difficult for sort of former senior cop to attack other senior cops um as gary would say on what could possibly go wrong with this answer but um the thing is the tone starts at the top and that that's in everything police do there's obviously a failure at the very top of the tree uh where you know former commissioner nixon couldn't remember being briefed uh turns out she was i mean i don't know how you can forget something like this there's been a bit of a trend in various places where people are being promoted to very senior ranks without actually having done the hard yards and without understanding the core business of the organization of policing uh and i think some of that has happened in melbourne um your victorian colleagues won't love you uh probably for that but those who love me will love me and those who didn't love me before probably hate me a bit more now so all right let me let me um turn to uh the talk about anti-corruption bodies in australia we've just seen the icac hearings here in new south wales playing out now the federal government is proposing a national anti-corruption body uh in your view do we need such a body look i'm not enough of a politician or a politically aware person to pass judgment on whether we need it or not but what i do know is if they are going to do it at the federal level the national level for the whole country they must think about the experience we've had in new south wales and other places and things have run off the rails one of the cornerstones of our justice system is the right to silence we've traded that off and we've got nothing in return you are now compelled to go to hearings they can do them and the secrecy provisions should be something they have to justify using they don't they don't it's just everything they do secret and if you want to complain about them there's no one to complain to with extraordinary power like that i've often said there must come extraordinary accountability extraordinary checks and balances icac not that long ago had completely run off their ass i look at their thwarted attempt to hunt down margaret canine i look at their attempt to hunt down murray key who was the commissioner of the ses and his deputy steve pearce failed prosecution on murray key no prosecution and steve peace ruined their lives there is no one to really complain to with teeth who can actually pull them in the line you have these bodies that have extraordinary power and they're unfitted they have an inspector who's supposed to investigate them it's usually a retired former supreme court judge let's say in his 80s who works two days a week and really legislatively has no power to tell them what to do the former police integrity commission was another body uh 13 adverse reports about major cases where they've you know essentially just completely ruined someone's life unfairly and the people were exonerated and so on there is no they call it the exoneration mechanism people get named and icac has been corrupt but ultimately there's not enough evidence to charge anyone or go to court there has to be a mechanism somewhere where that's expunged i know police who are friends of mine and gary's and others who have been called bad names by the police integrity commission if you google them it comes up but the end result was that they were found not to have done anything wrong so you can't do this to murderers i mean this business of taking away the right to silence police can't do that to murderers rapists and pedophiles and yet these bodies are allowed to do it pretty much willy-nilly with no justification it should be something you put out as the last resort and you must justify doing it there is none of that in place that sounds like a bit of a no to uh the need for such an organization i was going to say i'll get back to you on that but yeah um look let's let's skip again um we're sitting here in a room socially distanced madly socially distanced this is what a writer's festival looks like at this time it's it's lovely to have you all here but it's a little strange i think you probably all all feel that police have been the enforcers of some regulations some of them very very harsh in relation to covid that have been imposed on people how do you think covert has affected policing generally it's not positive that's for sure and again you know what could possibly go wrong with this answer um i won't get into much trouble but um the the thing is i think police have been asked to do a hell of a lot more that perhaps they shouldn't have had to um i think other government departments should have been given more of a role like health for instance and police have become sort of this 15 or 20 years in new south wales of bridge building to communities that's probably been damaged a little bit and it's not the police it's not their fault because they're doing what they need to do when they've been told to do um some of the fines that have been given out i think a lot of people are very angry about that that and um you know you would have seen the footage out of melbourne where that woman the pregnant lady in her pajamas was arrested and dragged away in front of her husband and kids for having posted a post on facebook saying that she was against um the the clampdowns in melbourne i never thought i'd see that in australia and i'm not passing judgement on anyone but these are the times we live in um i i i hope at the end of this some recognition is given to the fact that by governments that police must be allowed to sort of go back to their traditional role of only tackling the bad guys not jazz citizen and that's really what the problem is here um they're dishing out thousand dollar tickets to people who have never done anything wrong in their lives who have probably been pro authority and pro government all their lives um and that will linger and i mean you'll see some of that maybe you'll see it in jury verdicts down the track we used to say that um in in murder trials or other trials there's always one guy on the jury you wouldn't convict because he got booked by the highway patrol last week or something you know i don't know whether that's going to happen i hope it doesn't but it has had a negative effect effect that i think will take some time to dissipate uh it's been uh described in some quarters as a kind of militarization of the police do you see it going that far i don't i wouldn't call it militarization i mean they didn't change their tactics or equipment or get more heavy weapon heavy weaponry or anything like that but it was just that the things they were asked to do most importantly the people they were forced to take action against are not people that police should normally take action against they're just normal citizens who perhaps really object to this whole new world that we live in and it's strange none of us have done this before um i it just came out of left field and unfortunately it's going to be with us for a while nonetheless these are regulations um police job is to enforce regulations right sometimes these regulations can be good and sometimes they can be bad but it's still a police forces job to enforce them right yeah it is unfortunately yeah and that brings in your mind down the track problems for the relationship between the community and police yeah and i think that will have to be and almost certainly will be addressed by those in power that at some stage down the track is going to have to be extra effort at getting back to a sort of level relationship with the communities how have you seen policing change since you left is is there a shift um there's been many shifts so it's i just worked out next year it will be 40 years since i went into the police academy um you can imagine what's happened in 40 years i started a balmain in the inner west it was you know there was basically a painters and dockers suburb at that stage or they were just beginning to leave it's become quite trendy i do wish i brought real estate back then in balmain um but the police have probably the thing that has struck me the most is changing and changing regularly it's like a pendulum that sort of goes back and forth we in you know in the early 80s they said we can't be a force we they call that us a service and we began to get more sort of touchy-feely you know group hugs combo here all that sort of stuff and and then others came in and said no we're going back to being a force and we are a force and we must be feared and we will clamp down on crime and talk tough and do all of those things and then we went back again towards the um now whereas we didn't we didn't change the name again thankfully because it cost a lot in uh stationary and uniforms but um i think we're back to force again and we're staying as a force it's that that has probably changed the most and there's been a lot of research and a lot of academic thinking and writing about what police forces ought to do ultimately my view is police should have a contract with the community we will do the right thing and we will keep you safe and hopefully you will cooperate with us and value what we do and sometimes that is really you know works really well and it's in existence and then other times it runs off the rails i look at i'm sorry to digress i look at what's happening in the u.s at the moment it's completely off the rails that contracts completely broken most a lot of the public don't have faith in the police and a lot of police feel they've been unfairly and in some cases they have been tarnished by the the deeds of the few um there's no doubt there's bad things happening but committed by the police there's no doubt about it but the death of floyd i think is inexcusable um and we have to call it for what it is but there are a lot of good police who go out you know every day who do their best and have never done anything wrong who are now seen as sort of being some as part of some kind of you know organized crime group um a movement to definance do you yeah i could never i'm not sure if they're talking about shutting them down altogether or simply not giving them enough money to do their job properly and either way that's not really the problem uh i think you could talk to police organizations about having more community engagement program sensitivities type training all those sorts of things are important and some places have done it very well in the us and their models for that others not so well but i don't think shutting them down and taking their money away is really the answer and in australia it's 911 in america triple a here i don't think anyone in this room would want to ring triple o and say no we're sorry we're closed you're on your own just just on a day-to-day policing basis smartphones are everywhere so that everything any member of the police does is liable to be seen videoed by someone does that make a difference to how police operate absolutely and i remember talking to the riot squad in sydney not long before i retired and they'd had a couple of issues nothing major but i just said to them you must accept that every time you leave this building and go out to do your job if there's 50 people standing around in the street you can treat them as 50 channel 7 cameramen everyone will film everything everything will end up on the internet so essentially you've literally it does make things not not harder but you just need to be a lot more cautious of what you say and do because any unguarded comment any action whether it's good or bad or whatever you can count on being put out there and you can count on being held to account a lot more than it was in 1981 um you know it's not it's not all a bad thing but it is in in some ways it's restrictive in in that people are almost too scared to do what they might may want to do sometimes in terms of wrestling a bad guy or whatever but they don't want to make that decision because they're worried about how it's going to be interpreted when it's recorded it's often we've found in a number of cases it was edited before it was placed on the internet so that the bits that justify what happened are removed and it looks like it was just somebody that got an idea in their head and went and did something really bad um they're all things that i think there's a lot more pressure on police today particularly young police in general duties or the highway patrol who are out on you know where the rubber meets the road every day of the week because they are so accountable in so many more ways than they were 40 years ago apart from the the electronic aspect as you mentioned there is so many reporting requirements to so many bodies outside the police that you could almost spend your whole shift typing and not do what you they're supposed to do and also as we've seen in numerous cases young police having to account for split-second decisions in in in moments when they find themselves in peril that's very difficult it is and this is the thing that i actually get quite upset about this said so somebody in the middle of a an absolute bump fight makes a decision good bad or indifferent and then they spend months sometimes years agonizing over whether he did the right thing or not and they have qcs and they have judges look at it and they spend months deliberating and discussing every movement that happened and they come to a conclusion he's done the wrong thing now if it took them that long this poor person this man or woman has had to make a split decision they don't really factor that in often um you know sometimes they do but there's been some really you know really bizarre decisions uh from the oversight bodies where they expect someone to have done a whole lot of deliberation when something has happened and they've had to react and if they had not reacted the consequences would have been much worse you had um i think it's eight years on the australian counterterrorism committee am i right um you had top uh five eyes security clearance would you like to share with us what do you think um is the top security threat facing australia today i i think it has to be jihadi terrorism um however and that is the main threat i don't think anyone can deny that but there is an emerging threat it's been there for quite a while and i don't think we're perhaps doing enough about it and that's right-wing extremism and it seems to have got a lot more oxygen i have to say since trump was elected uh there are people in australia who have online joined with groups that are sympathetic to that view and i see it as a real threat i'm not saying you've got to keep it in context it's not as big a threat as a much broader much more international threat of jihadi terrorism uh extreme fundamentalism but it is something that i think authorities in australia have to deal with asia have spoken about this extensively they see it as a threat and going back to the 80s i'm aware that they were not monitoring that that side of the the threat um and you know i have said in a couple of opinion pieces that i think we need to do more in that space um very quick example i don't know how we're going for the time no one's waving at me yet but um the the the the american they've got in america they've got something like 15 16 maybe 17 000 police agencies now from one man sheriff departments to huge police departments like new york you know the biggest in the world and so on the fbi publishes an annual report on hate crimes they actually gather the data from all the agencies and report on the whole of the us and the old axiom in policing is if you can't measure it you can't deal with it you're not really going to have you know an insight into what the heck's happening the trends and so on in australia we have eight police forces just eight and yet none of them actually record that information none of them have a system that talks to each other that collates it and no one is actually i mean if something happens uh bad graffiti painted on a synagogue or a muslim woman attacked for wearing a hijab it's down as malicious damage to property or an assault there isn't really a category across australia that that deals with hate crimes against minorities and so on and i think that's a failing on our part because we're not measuring how bad it may be or may not be it may not be bad but there are independent groups in the community who try to do that but they don't have access or the sort of access i think you really need for gathering that sort of data and i think if you're not if you're just not measuring it you're not really aware of what you know the trends and how big it is so you can't really deal with it effectively and why do you think uh we do have that what you would regard i guess as a blind spot why are we not more interested in um i i guess um just to quote winston churchill who used to talk about the americans he says they can always be counted on to do the right thing after they've tried all other options and i think we're trying all other options at the moment and we'll eventually get to do the right thing okay so i think um this might be a good moment i don't know whether anyone have any one of you has been incubating a question while we've been chatting yes look there's one there what we're not doing is handing out microphones for for covered reasons so um if you'd like to stand up maybe in speakers later what they did in the last session is the person who sat in your seat repeated the question for the zoo well i can try and do that as well it's not a dorothy dixon but it's a topic near and dear to my heart thank you the question was how important is it that police have minorities and communities in among them recruited and joined and all that we did a lot of effort in that space um i sort of used to be exhibit a in many ways there's a couple of people here who work with me in that space who helped me greatly in that space it's about convincing minority groups ethnic and otherwise to see the benefit of having members of their community join we did a lot of not a lot we didn't do enough research into what was happening in that space we did increase the intake we set out to attract people from the asian community from the arabic community any all the migrant communities and we held recruitment days and we had stuff on the internet and all of that to try and recruit people to join the cops it is absolutely essential to answer your call question i think a police force that reflects the community it serves the more accurately that is the better they'll be prepared to deal with and understand and empathize with the community particularly when there are crisis crisis so um my sense and i've been gone three or four years now is that we had increased the intake of people from those communities but they were leaving within five or six years they were not staying and of course when you leave the police you're supposed to do an exit interview and they ask what are you unhappy about why did you go hardly anyone does it no one wants to say anything bad i did my own as you'd expect due diligence and just spoke to a few of the guys who had left and they basically felt that there were racist tones in in the meal room sometimes they were copying it from the community and they just didn't want to do it anymore and i really regret that i really couldn't i didn't really fix that and i don't know that any one person can but it is essential in my view for police to do their best not only to engage with communities but to attract as many as they can from those communities into their numbers i look at the us again and i think areas where they have a police chief who is african-american and large number of staff who are from that community i i think they have less problems in those places it's a reality if you reflect the community you serve those among you who understand why this is happening will tell you hang on that's not what you think it is it's this or this or this uh i have a question here that was handed to me which is from an anonymous questioner can you identify a point at which the police force became more political in the sense of being more aligned to the government um perhaps more than was once the case the position of commissioner seems to become increasingly politicized what say you yeah what could possibly go wrong with that question as well gosh um i i'd i'd probably say the the mid or late 90s in new south wales things changed dramatically um we had a commissioner called peter ryan came in who did many good things but he didn't understand the new south wales environment and he clashed with the government and his deputy certainly clashed with the government jeff jarrett jeff jarrett sued the new south wales police these are all matters of public knowledge and they had to settle because they didn't have a leg to stand on they'd break on all the rules and how they sacked him and so on because he didn't fit in with the government's view of things they then brought in what is commonly called the jared amendment which is essentially legislating that the government of the day can sac the commissioner or any of the senior executive staff assistant commissioner or above and you cannot sue you cannot sue no matter what they do to you you cannot sue when you leave now just think about that for a minute the independent office of constable the westminster system the separation of powers dead essentially and i'm not saying this happens every day of the week but police and senior police see executives through no fault of their own are now at the mercy of the government of the day their contracts may not be renewed they may let them serve out there you get five year contracts usually um or they may actually remove you all together and there is nothing you can do about it i think it's that that for me is the crux of the problem and there is no doubt that policing has become quite politicized what has also happened in my view and again very controversially is governments generally now tend to want the person they appoint to a as police commissioner or the senior people to be someone who will never disagree with them who will do exactly what they want and he'll perhaps not really stick up for the rank and file or for what's right and i think gary especially talked about moral courage doing what's right sometimes even though you know it's going to cause you grief but yet you still do it because it's the right thing to do and i don't see enough of that in my view in policing do you think that you were in inverted commerce a victim of politics in in your time i i don't think there's any doubt about that um i was a victim of a botched sort of internal affairs police integrity commission operation this is all public knowledge and i there's 114 of us that were illegally bugged that's all been proven and but not some of them so we had an inquiry into the bugging which turned into an inquiry into uh who revealed the wrongdoing not what happened all those years before and some very close friends of mine were absolutely bastardized by that inquiry had nervous breakdowns one fellow ended up falling out of the witness box and being uh he had they had to get an ambulance to take him away that's the force you know again no right the silence secret hearings stuff that is really stalinist russia was happening in sydney um sorry just so what i what i was told repeatedly if you kick up a stink you'll never be commissioner i forced a parliamentary inquiry into what was happening and guess what i didn't become commissioner but i don't you know what i regret nothing i'd do it all again if i had my time ever again it was the right thing to do and it was for those who could not stick up for themselves it is still wrong it's never been righted and successive governments and successive premiers are well aware of what's happened here but they won't do anything about it it's all part of the system just a very quick question on on your last answer do you believe that that is the principal reason why you were not made new south wales police commissioner i'll never know but i think it was one of the main reasons if not the main reason i was seen as someone who was going to do what i thought was right even if it hurt the government and i think that's what police and senior police and commissioners ought to do that if it's not right you can't do it just because a premier or a minister asks you to do it um i mean it's that slippery slope that gary jubilan talks about where you do a small favor and it becomes a bigger favor and the next thing you know you're just doing whatever the hell they want and i i honestly don't think i remember louis freya who's a good friend of mine former director of the fbi when they were forced the fbi was forced to investigate clinton for a whole bunch of things including the monica lewinsky thing and all that he refused to accept the pass to get into the white house because it meant he didn't have to sign in and no one could tell when he came and went he wanted every contact recorded he wanted to be on a level where he's not palling around with the president who he's actually having to investigate and i to me that's that's the moral compass it's about saying i'm not going to be your friend i don't need to be your friend i shouldn't be your friend i need to you know exercise my duties and carry out the law in a frank and fearless way without worrying about well is it going to upset this minister or is it going to upset that premier it shouldn't really be what decides what police do but it often is implicit in your comments is a criticism of um the current executive hierarchy of the police do you intend it to be that no no i didn't and there's a lot of really good people really trying hard battling against the system that in many ways is stacked against them none of them were responsible for this legislation that they are all at peril of you know the pleasure of the government okay look i'd be remiss if i didn't go to this question from greg moriarty on domestic violence is it time to treat it as organized crime to get a stronger response look it's a very very serious crime and unless things have changed my memory is a female usually not often mao dies every week at the hands of her partner in australia and i i just find that astounding it's not an organized it's not an organized group but with organized crime investigations you actually investigate a group and you look at their assets and and and how they're functioning as a team and you try and break all that up smash them basically unfortunately you can't do that with what with domestic violence i think more focus is always welcome in that space i think more effort about prevention is definitely a very good thing but i don't think you can adopt the the organized crime uh methods of investigation to tackle that because they're not a group they're not talking to each other they just each do it in at home um it's a dreadful situation i mean i've got daughters and i've got a wife and and i don't know how it gets so bad with people that this sort of stuff happens but it does and it's a reality and and you know the police have done an awful lot in that space and then there's been legislative change where even if women change their minds later on and say no it never happened they actually record video record now the initial contact and the initial complaint and the courts allowed to use that under this legislation even if the person retracts her statement because of pressure and all the usual things that happen afterwards okay i think we are really running out of time if that's a quick question we'll have that one thank you brian too yesterday talking about the security state said that atm has never prosecuted a single spa in 70 years what would you do with the resources okay so let me just go to that question for our online audience uh the the charge made by the writer investigative reporter brian tui is that azio has never prosecuted a single spy what would unique do with the resources intelligence resources can i just clarify never prosecuted us by working for a foreign government in australia or prosecuted one of their own or both sorry um i i i mean i i think they're doing a great deal already and i think by and large um they do a fair job the one thing they perhaps what if i you know if i was god what i would do is get them to be more open about things there are a lot of things they can and should talk about that they probably don't and their engagement with law enforcement could always use more more you know a lot of it is on a very personal basis where you've got to know someone for 20 years and i had that for all those years and in the olympic games and so on it was all built on personal relationships where you knew someone they got to know you they trusted you and then the next thing you know the relationship and the cooperation and the exchange of information became more smooth i'd probably do a little bit about that but i i don't know why and i wasn't aware that they had never prosecuted anyone for spying for a foreign government if that's what he meant um i'm not sure why that would happen because i've there's certainly been people here who have done that bad stuff look on that i think we are going to have to um call it call a halt to this really terrific discussion nick thank you so much for all those perspectives from all those parts of the world and from australia as well would you please thank nick thank you